h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, with his "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" speech. This pulled the rug from underneath the Tories and both parties have continaully moved towards a more authoritarian position ever since."

The problem I have with this is that they never tried to be "tough on the causes of crime" ever...

For my if you really want to deal with crime then a government has to come up with

a) A sensible and intergrated drugs policy, which is not based soley on knee jerk Daily Mail-ism

b) An answer to to the problems of estates with chronic unemployment.

c) The problems of failing schools.

Simply saying "'angins to good for em, bring back the birch, build more prisons" isn't doing anything to tackle the causes of crime at all.

I have a funny feeling one of my postings has been removed!!!! what did i say that required censorship? I feel nonplussed and rather aggrieved

Red, I didn't see your posting but, judging by the posts that followed it, it was probably removed for mentioning the candidates.

From the Rules: "Please don't discuss individual candidates. What we'd like to hear from you is how you are personally affected by the issues themselves. This is, after all, the Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything and we feel there's greater value in sticking to the issues than focusing on any individual."

I'm kind of curious as well!

Check the email account you used to register Red, you'll have an explanation of why the post was pulled.

Yeah GodBen's right. I mentioned my local candidate. I didn't realise. Seems somewhat ironic because you can only actually vote for your local candidate....that must be the reason. So I can slag off the highy ups like TB, MH. CK........but not my lowly local candidate

I couldn't agreed more with you FB.

But you've got to admit: if you want to steal the Conservative Party's thunder over law & order - a topic where they had had a lead since the year dot. Then there was no more spectacular way of doing it than the "Tough on etc" speech.

I remember when I saw it on TV. I turned my head back to the screen as I couldn't believe what I'd just heard out of the mouth of a Labour politician. You see that was the moment that I stopped trusting Tony Blair, I got there way before it became fashionable to dislike the chap.

Another really importnant part of criminal justice policy has IMHO to be what do you do with criminals when you incarcerate them?

It is very fashionalbe to have the lock 'em up for 23 hours a day philosophy but unless you intend to keep them locked up forwever this is unlikely to stop them from re-offending.

However dealing with this owulod take an act of political courage. Prisons need to have better educational facilities, and IMHO parole should be intrinsically linked to Prisnors using these facilities. If prisnors were forced to learn trades and get qualification if they want to get out early then I reckon this would massivly cut re-offending rates.

Just a reply to the first post in this thread - when quoting polls like this, can you also include a source for the information? It makes it difficult for us to ascertain whether it's a genuine poll result or not, and if there's any doubt we may have to air on the side of caution and remove the posting - which we don't want to do.

Cheers,

Well I was just saying polls in general. The BBC Election 2005 site has a page for most of the major polls: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/polltracker/html/default.stm